[Release] Tyrant's Virtual Mission Tools (VMT)
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Fair enough [emoji16]
Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
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Yeah Reddog’s interactive map is very cool and all but VMT was/is unique and very powerful for package planning!
Glad to see you’re still around Tyant and thank you for your explanation as to why a VMT update will be a fair while off/if at all.
I certainly hope you’ll find a chance to update the program as there will be many members of the active BMS communities who will be VERY lost without it! (It currently gives an error when trying to open a .35 file).
Cheers
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OK, I’ve got a beta that should work with 4.35 here:
http://org.craigandera.vmt.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/435-beta/
Would love it if people could give it a test drive and report any problems they find. This time, unlike with the 4.34 version, I promise I will finish the updates and post to the stable channel once we’re happy with it.
Welp, I guess now I have to get my 4.35 setup flyable so I can make sure the generated weather works.
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Will probablly give it a go for our weekflights next year!
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Thanks so much Tyrant!!
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Great work!
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OK, I’ve got a beta that should work with 4.35 here:
http://org.craigandera.vmt.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/435-beta/
Would love it if people could give it a test drive and report any problems they find. This time, unlike with the 4.34 version, I promise I will finish the updates and post to the stable channel once we’re happy with it.
Welp, I guess now I have to get my 4.35 setup flyable so I can make sure the generated weather works.
Well done. It seems to work for vanilla KTO.
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A happiest New Year, dear Tyrant.
Thanks a lot for releasing the updated VMT, I was almost missing it.
And also I can confirm that it runs fine on KTO, as Lorik stated.
I’m just hoping you can extend its capabilities to the other theaters, if time will let you doing so, of course.In this while, well done once again!
With best regards.
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A happiest New Year, dear Tyrant.
Thanks a lot for releasing the updated VMT, I was almost missing it.
And also I can confirm that it runs fine on KTO, as Lorik stated.
I’m just hoping you can extend its capabilities to the other theaters, if time will let you doing so, of course.In this while, well done once again!
With best regards.
Just to be clear, it should work fine with other theaters as long as they are the same size as KTO. ITO and Balkans, for instance, are the same size and should work as-is. Or at least, they always used to be.
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Thanks a lot for your explainations and attention, Tyrant.
But, well… I can assure you that now they don’t any longer. Just Balkans and ITO, I mean.
Here’s why my spoke.To be more precise, instead, because your hard work deserves it:
- KTO, emf and Korea training beta are running fine;
- Balkans, Balkans Lorik, Korea TvT (how strange that), Israel, KTO Joseon light, LorikKTO and Kuwait, don’t;
- the weather function runs fine (tested with KTO, emf and Korea training beta).
Hope it helps you.
With best regards.
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Huh, may have spoken too soon - Korea TvT theater doesn’t work. Looks like falcon4_ct.xml isn’t in the place it used to be. But then again, it’s not there for my 4.34 install either. So I’m guessing VMT has been broken for TvT in 4.34 since always.
It must fall back for some files to the ones from the normal KTO…
I’m downloading Balkans and ITO now to try them out. Will report back.
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Thanks a lot for your explainations and attention, Tyrant.
But, well… I can assure you that now they don’t any longer… just Balkans and ITO, I mean.
Here’s why my spoke.With best regards.
Ah sorry, posted before you wrote this.
OK, I will look into it and get it fixed. Like I said, downloading the theaters now.
I will say that I’ve had problems with third-party theaters in the past. There are workarounds for specific bugs in e.g. Balkans, where it has bad data that Falcon is tolerant of. Anyway, hopefully it’s something simple.
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Thanks a lot.
I just posted above the complete (well, so I hope at least) list of test I made.
Hope it’s useful for you.
With best regards.
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Thanks a lot for your explainations and attention, Tyrant.
But, well… I can assure you that now they don’t any longer. Just Balkans and ITO, I mean.
Here’s why my spoke.To be more precise, instead, because your hard work deserves it:
- KTO, emf and Korea training beta are running fine;
- Balkans, Balkans Lorik, Korea TvT (how strange that), Israel, KTO Joseon light, LorikKTO and Kuwait, don’t;
- the weather function runs fine (tested with KTO, emf and Korea training beta).
Hope it helps you.
With best regards.
Thanks, this is super helpful. Testing is a pretty big part of the work involved, so any time someone pitches in that makes my job easier.
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OK, after a whole lot of painful staring at hex dumps of raw campaign data file, it appears to me that objectives are 28 bytes bigger in ITO and Balkans than they are in KTO, but I have no idea why. Mission Commander doesn’t show me any difference between objectives in those theaters vs. KTO that I can see would make a difference.
I’m hesitant to put in a hack like looking at the name of the theater. That just seems fragile, as I’ve tried to make VMT work even for theaters I didn’t test against (aside from the known problems of TvT and non-1024 theaters - some day). But I can’t figure out what piece of data I would look at that would tell me that an objective is bigger in ITO than KTO. I think the last bit of data for an objective is the radar data, so I don’t know how I would tell that I’m looking at one versus the other. Both are database version 103, so that isn’t it.
Kind of stumped here. It’s nearly impossible to infer the structure of the data with just the raw bytes.
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Well, I don’t have a permanent solution to this yet, but I’m working on it. In the meantime I implemented a hack that, while gross, should work fine. Balkans, ITO, and KTO missions all load fine for me now, but of course I don’t have the bandwidth to test it to the extent all of you collectively do. I think everything works except for Korea TvT and large theaters. Those I have no current plans to implement support for, as I think TvT is only little used, and large theater support requires substantial changes to the code.
Anyway, should work with Balkans and ITO now. Please test with these and whatever other theaters you care to throw at it:
http://org.craigandera.vmt.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/435-beta/
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thanks a lot for your tools, Tyrant !
but the Random parameters for weather generate some strange behavior without knowing why…I don’t think now the current weather model accepts anything
I tested many cases and I m pretty sure : the bug comes from TWX & FMAP files created from VMT
in this video, you can see the backUp ADI + ADI + horizon line on HUD change when Nose wheel steering is activated
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OK, good info. The TWX format is pretty complicated, unfortunately. The turbulence values produced are a complex function of the new sliders in the UI, so I sort of punted and may have made some mistakes there. The FMAP format, however, I think is unchanged.
I’m not too surprised that the random weather is a little quirky. The changes to the weather system in 4.34 made it WAY more complicated, and I think maybe I didn’t do a great job of figuring out how to constrain that in the VMT UI. But can we try to narrow it down a bit? If you keep the VMT-generated FMAPs but save a new TWX (edit the weather in the BMS UI), does the problem still happen? What if you reverse that (make a simple FMAP in Weather Commander)?
Another thing to try is to force VMT to generate very simple weather. The easy way to do that is to make a weather override that covers the whole theater. Enter a radius and falloff of 50, for example. If you still see weirdness with, say, sunny weather and constant temperature and pressure over the whole theater, it’s likely that I goofed up the file formats. If not, then it may just be that VMT is generating weather parameters that the BMS weather engine isn’t able to deal with.